This sums it all up.

NBA Statistics and League Leaders - National Basketball Association - ESPN

Unfair comparison.

Greg Oden is 41 years old.
Amir is still a pup.

LOL...

Can Varejao stay out of foul trouble?

Here's an analysis of Anderson Varejao's foul problem written at the end of '07.

Might be a good parallel for the Amir situation.

Interesting.

So Vercinetorix fouls at a three year rate of 14.3 (14.3 fouls per 100 minutes), and Amir is fouling at a two year rate (this and last) of 18.7 - or a 31% higher rate.

That's 19th in the league among all players who have entered a game this season and 1st among players who have played at least 400 minutes.


Any way you slice it, that's a lot of fouls.

P.S.

Tay and AI are among the league leaders in lack of fouling - at 3.6 and 3.8. They foul about five times less often than Amir.

Lowest rates of fouling from the bottom...

Nash
McGrady
Crawford
Redd
Stackhouse
Parker
Finley
...then TP & AI.

The theme there seems to be that really bad defenders don't foul very often. Nash, Crawford, Redd?

That makes Tay's D all the more impressive, since he is doing it clean.

Really good defenders don't foul much, and really, really bad defenders who can't stay within arm's reach of their man a la this list.

It looks to me like the list for lowest foul rates is this (per 48):

1) Chris Bosh/ Anthony Parker/ OJ Mayo/ Ron Artest- 2.8
5) Kidd/ CJ Watson/ Nowitski/ Blake/ S. Jackson/ Ben Wallace- 2.9

So, you're right that it is a mix between good and bad defenders. But it does seem like it's weighted a little heavier toward good defenders.

On a separate note, if you look at FG% for PF's, and you exclude players with < 100 FGA's, then Amir Johnson has the highest FG% at .586.

#2 Carl Landry
#3 Pau Gasol
#4 Varejao
#5 Boozer
#6 Millsap
#7 Staudemire
#8 Darko .547


And speaking of Darko. Perhaps he is the best possible parallel for Amir on the foul front. Both are defensive specialist big men who never played college bball and spent several seasons buried on the Pistons' bench.

In Darko's first season, he comitted a foul every 4.8 minutes, or 20.7 fouls every 100 minutes. By last year, he had that rate down to 1 foul every 9.0 minutes or 11.1 fouls every 100 minutes. He essentially cut his fouling in half.

Sorry to compare Amir to Darko, but it made sense this one time.

__________________
You can never have perfect introspection: because if you could, then you could determine what you were going to do ten seconds from now, and then do something else.

Unfortunately in the fouls per minute ranking for this season the closest big men with comparable minutes to AJ are Gadzuric and Roy Hibberts. Darko currently is at 13.8 - about 30% lower than AJ.

Your EFG% point about AJ is what makes this fouling thing so frustrating. He has a really nice touch around the basket (nothing that quite resembles a post move, but still...). It would surely be nice if he had the opportunities that would come with the ability to play 30 MPG.